July 30, 2010

Good morning. You may be seated, please. We’re looking at, we will quickly look at the history, very briefly, of Ephesus. And I want you to just think about something: How could a culture and a society so, I will say, advanced, acclimated, the major trade center, the emporium of the world at the time Asia Minor how could it just be mere ruins and rubbles? What happened to these people, what happened to their society and their culture?

When we talk about history, those are the things that should provoke thought. And some of you still might not be there, I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but picture show me your hands! How many of you have been to LAX? Show me your hands! My condolences, but picture, you know, all the corridors and all the hallways when you go, it’s bustling.

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that now, it’s not really bustling people are just standing in line. But picture, you’ve seen LAX with all the planes standing by and the engines running and people going and running and doing. And then imagine you could come back to LAX in 100 years or 200 years from now and it’s deserted. The pristine paint somewhere is now scraped away, the planes, what’s left, that have been cannibalized-parts. I’m being ludicrous, but it’s to say we, when we picture history and civilization that has now disappeared, we have this mindset that somehow we don’t get into “What happened to these people? And I take a current place you know of because Ephesus was the epicenter.

If you know a little bit about the geography of where it’s located, you’ll find it sits, or at the time of what we’re going to look at, sat right at the tip of the sea. Three rivers that supplied, right away there, three rivers you know are going to supply food and water. It was a bustling place. You have, in historical factors, things for example not the largest, but a very large artificial harbor that was made for Ephesus for trade, and the four roads that you could take to go anywhere if you were buying or selling goods in that time frame. We think of Ephesus and we think of Paul. We think of John, we think of the letters to the Church.

July 23, 2010

I wish they would have said Gabriel or identified them, but just ‘the angel, he’s got no title poor guy. “Of Him to the slave of Him John.” Now here again, Textus Receptus, some of you may have a semi-colon or a colon after ‘John.’ It’s one big run-along sentence from verse 1 to verse 2 there’s no stop, and it will make sense to you when you read it all the way through. Let me read it all the way through in the King James first because, “the things which must shortly come to pass; and He sent and signified it by His angel unto His servant John who bare record of the word of God,” just keeps flowing, “and the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all the things that he saw.” Okay.

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that this is important because when you read it chapter and verse it almost sounds like we may be talking about Jesus, we may be talking about somebody else I don’t know. No, he’s talking about what John saw and I love what happens with the Greek in this, we’ll call it verse 2, but really not. You’re familiar with this we know the word that’s being used for ‘witness’ and ‘testimony’ at the root of it has the ‘martyr’ word. They’re using it. They’re translating it in the King James as ‘testimony’ I believe ‘testimony, ‘bare record’ and ‘testimony.’ Those are the two words both of those in the Greek are the ‘martyr’ words which from where you’ll normally see “witness.”

Here are the two words and you can see this puts it in the past behind, again another same concept: verb, indicative, ahorist active which means it’s a past tense, it happened in the past-historical event back there and the subject because it’s active, the subject is doing the action. Now, if you throw all that out the window what’s really important is this: you can read this verse, “who bare record of the word of God” and miss something so sensational. John refers to Jesus as the Logos – the Word, “In the beginning was the Word”, the Logos. He was, John was witness to, we’re going to use their judicial frame of reference, was witness to the ‘martyring of the Word.’ It’s woven in there just so ever so slightly that when we read the text we don’t come across with that sense. “Who bare the record of the Word of God”, as if I have a Bible and this is the record.

No, it’s more than that. He bore the record because he lived and saw Jesus in the flesh, but he also saw the Word being martyred. So, the Greek has a little spin to it. “The Word of God, and” this is really great because this word here, ten marturesen, is being used as a noun. This is being used as a verb which means action. This noun: person, place or thing. So, when we get down to reading the sentence structure itself, “who bare record of the Word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and all the things that he saw,” think of a courtroom. Think of something where you have the action committed and the witness who sees the evidence. He, John, is the person with the evidence. He “bore the record”, yes, but it’s the evidence of Christ.

July 16, 2010

I want to share with you what he amassed because it is so succinct with regards to where the ark landed. Because, we will get there, won’t be today. But if you read in your Bible just to give you some idea so we can come back to outside of the Bible for a minute, if you read in your Bible in I believe it’s 8 8th chapter, 4th verse, it says: “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains” mountains – plural – “of Ararat.”

Now I do not want to talk about Berossus because I just did in talking about Gilgamesh, the Gilgamesh Epic which we know Berossus was superb at deciphering and putting a lot of the pieces together. But just to show you how deep this problem because I know there is still people listening who are saying “Oh you know this is just a Bible story.” It’s not. And I wish, I don’t wish for someone to find this to validate the Bible.

I think the quest for it is, is exciting and it should be like you know if they find it there is one place that looks really, really, really, really good. But even so, the mountains of Ararat, which is very correct it is not one mountain; it is a mountain range. The Samaritan Pentateuch has the landing place of Noah’s Ark in the Kurdish Mountains north of Assyria. I do not know how we got here but it is what it is. The Targums, which I wrote the Aramaic out of one of the Onkelos being they have the ark in the Kardo Mountains; and as a sidebar some of you that have this Bible in the Aramaic text, look it up you will find the same thing – Kardo, not Ararat.

Josephus, historian – most people don’t really have any quarrel with what he had to say. Josephus living and writing during the first century A.D., Josephus was a man of Jewish birth who was loyal to the Roman Empire. He mentions the remains of Noah’s Ark three times. Now remember step back in time. The closer back or the further back you go the better the sources are which we don’t have anymore. So was Josephus making this up three different times?

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that the first is found in the 4th volume of his Antiquities of the Jews and it reads: “Then the ark settled on a mountaintop in Armenia. Noah, thus learning that the earth was delivered from the flood, waited yet seven days, let the animals out of the ark, went forth himself and his family, sacrificed to God, feasted with his household. The Armenians called the spot of the landing place they call it ‘the spot’ of the landing place for it was there that the ark came safe to land. And they showed the relics of it to this day.” There are plenty of photos but they are so poor in quality I won’t even waste time showing them.

July 9, 2010

And don’t turn here I’m going to read you Hebrews 11, we’re not staying there so I’m going to turn and read it to you. Hebrews 11:7 reads: “By faith Noah, being warned of God of the things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” Now can you imagine this 500 year-old man? We know that the flood started in the 600th year of his life, with his three children, but can you imagine him building an ark? And step out of the frame of disbelief and just walk into a world where if you could visualize it: here is this 500 year-old man.

That is already preposterous. Who is going to build an ark and they’ve never seen rain before? Talk about crazy! I mean, probably they passed him by and said, “That old fool is out there, whatever he is building.” You know this is a joke; probably the butt of many jokes but it didn’t matter. He built the ark because God told him to. Now there was not the written word of God at this point, but Noah received the word of God by hearing, by God speaking or revealing to him; and he was obedient in Faith to conform to what God had told him to do. Build an ark. So he did. Faith, we know, substantiates.

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that if you go back to the 1st verse in Hebrews, ‘Faith substantiates the things hoped for’ so when Noah was told, he did by Faith. Now going into the 6th chapter with a background, everybody here I am sure is familiar with the different origins of the flood. The one that everybody seems to be familiar with is the Gilgamesh Epic, which states the flood. We know the cuneiform tablets that were found they were interpreted and some scholar even said, “Wow! There is a semblance to the Bible.” Now many want to say that Gilgamesh and the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Bible; that the Bible copied Gilgamesh.

God is not a copycat, okay. So, we may have a case of people not outlining timeframes. Certainly, we don’t have all the answers and it would be unfair to try and say we have all the answers in one hour, just cannot be done. Men have devoted their entire lives for generations for the answers which, like I said, some of them are just not available to us.

July 2, 2010

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that if they were going to fudge it, they should have fudged it the whole way. You know how I love dictionaries; I looked up ‘meek’ versus ‘poor.’ You have it at the bottom of your handout. For those folks at home ‘meek’ Webster’s definition “patient, mild, spiritless, spineless, gentle. ‘Poor’ lacking material possessions, having little or no means, and ‘poor’ can be spiritual or material. There is a difference. This word ‘meek’ was originally used in the Greek of taming wild horses and breaking wild horses, not to suggest some genteel attitude on the part of someone. “To bind up” “he hath sent me” he hath sent me to bind up” and here “he hath sent me to heal.” Is that the same? No, it’s not.

Let’s read on here. “To bind up the brokenhearted” if we read on the top, “to heal the brokenhearted” on the bottom. “To proclaim liberty to the captives,” what does it say here “to preach deliverance to the captives,” and “recovering of sight to the blind.” Where is that? Where is that? Am I missing something” Is it in there” It’s not in there. It’s not even in the text supposedly, that whole thing that’s outlined in blue on your paper there. And “recovering of sight to the blind” is in the New Testament but it’s not in the Old. And you folks at home go stick your fingers between the pages and flip back and forth if you have to. And the last line in the King James says “to set at liberty them that are bruised.” That’s not even in here.

Okay. I’ve made my point, initially to show the difference of the text. Let me go through this briefly because I’m going somewhere else, really I am. This is the Septuagint Greek; this is what the text on your second handout should look like. Unfortunately, there are many Greek New Testament manuscripts, the bold type that you have, that would be the New Testament Greek. The middle portion that I’ve handwritten is what I had to add in because there are no text that have the Septuagint tagged like this, so improvisation is a necessity here. We have pneuma ‘spirit,’ and everybody’s got a different deal here. If you can believe this, ‘spirit’ in the Greek is neuter and in the Hebrew it’s feminine. I don’t know.

Kuriou which we have Lord and if read there are brackets, those are added in to make it flow but it would read spirit. This here makes it “of Lord” and it’s genitive. I don’t want to get too much into the grammar because I really want you to see the important words that I’ve circled. I wrote on your handout “It starts here.” It all starts with God in the genitive, Lord. Ep eme “upon me,” hou, and I love this word I know all of you that are like me are going to remember this word Heineken, That’s what it says. I learned something in church today. Really, okay. It’s translated by the translators “on account.” I’ve crossed that out because it is genitive as well which means it is for His sake. “The spirit of Lord is upon me” for His sake. This is an important word I’m going to come back to because it’s so important to see the little things woven in for us. Echrisen “He anointed.” This is why we go back to the text. You know one thing kuriou simply “Lord.” Okay. Echrisen, the e is at the front, puts it in the past so he hath or he anointed me is fine which means there is not a repetition of Lord. The way this is put for us, lets us see it is ‘He’ it would be a personal pronoun. “He” and that should be capital, “He hath anointed me.” We’re going to make the corrections before we proceed.